Embassytown - China Miéville

   2011; 369 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Steampunk; Hard Science Fiction.  Laurels: 2012 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Embassytown lies at the edge of our universe.  Literally.  It straddles the hazy line between the Immer (the “Always”) and the Manchmal (the “Sometimes”).  You and I would call the Immer the Universe.  No one is sure exactly what the Manchmal is like.  Those who have bravely journeyed there have never returned.

    Avice Brenner Cho was born and raised in Embassytown.  She is an “Immerser”, meaning she’s traveled the Immer,  That's somewhat unusual for somebody from her hometown.  Now she's returned to her roots, which is even more uncommon.  Hardly nobody who leaves Embassytown ever wants to return home.

    The city hosts all sorts of ambassadors from all sorts of other parts of the cosmos.  Kedis, Shur’asi, Pannegetch, and of course, humans from Terre.  The proper term for the sentient natives of this land is “the Ariekei”, but they're more commonly referred to as “the Hosts”.

    Communicating with the Hosts is a daunting task, and is mostly relegated to ambassadors.  The Hosts rarely deign to communicate with anyone less than an envoy, but recently they’ve taken interest in Avice.  For reasons unknown, they want her to perform something called a “simile” ritual, with the promise that she will not be harmed and will be amply compensated for her participation.

    Avice complies, and apparently lived up to Ariekei expectations.  They have declared Avice to now be a simile.  And a very specific one at that.

    Henceforth, Avice is the simile known as “a girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her.”

What’s To Like...

    The storyline in Embassytown is anything but typical.  We aren’t saving the galaxy from annihilation or rescuing a princess; indeed, we’re doing little more than defending a city and trying to understand what makes the Ariekei tick.

    The world-building is phenomenal.  You’re on a planet far away from Earth, and several centuries in the future.  Things are different, and the English language has evolved.  It's now called Anglo-Ubiq, and China Miéville invents all sorts of new words to tell his story, such as miabs, automs, shiftfather, floaking, trids, corvids, “into the out”, sublux, and exoterres.  Sometimes he gives a brief explanation of what these mean; other times you can figure them out from context.  For example, you can pretty much guess that “sublux” means “less than light speed”.

    Also, the book is written in “English”, not American”, so you have jewellery and licences, colours and rancour, metres and artefacts, etc.  All China Miéville novels are a vocabularian’s delight.  I was delighted to run across ogees (a crossword puzzle word) and politesse (a word I first heard Mick Jagger sing), and the elegant phrase “homo dispora”.

    The story is told in the first-person POV (Avice’s), and the settings are limited to Embassytown and the surrounding countryside.  The Ariekei have a whole different way of looking at language, and are fascinated by the bizarre human habit called “lying”, something totally foreign to them.  They go as far as to hold “Festivals of Lies” to see if any of them are even capable of telling lies.  And just as they start to come to grips with falsehoods, something unprecedented happens.  New ambassadors show up, and the Hosts go berserk.  Literally.

  

    The ensuing chaos builds to a good, logical, not-particularly-twisty ending, which surprisingly has a hopeful tone to it.  There’s certainly literary room for sequels (surely further adventures wait for Avice and the Manchmal begs to be explored), but if Miéville has penned any, I’m not aware of them.

Kewlest New Word...

Polysemy (n.) : the coexistence of many possible meanings for a word or phrase.

Others: Semitic (adj.); Politesse (n.); Unbowdlerized (adj.); Louche (adj.); Risible (adj.); Scupper (as a verb); Misprisioned (v.); Necrophage (n.).

Kindle Details...

    Embassytown sells for $12.99 right now, which is fitting for a work by a top-tier steampunk sci-fi author.  China Miéville’s other novels go for anywhere from $4.99 to $13.99.  If you have enough patience, China Miéville occasionally offers generous discounts on his books, sometimes as low as $1.99.

Excerpts...

    “What’s out there?” I said.  Wyatt shook his head.

    “I don’t know.  You’d know better than me, immerser, and you don’t know at all.  But something.  There’s always something.”  There was always something in the immer.  “Why’s there a pharos here?” he said.  “You don’t put a lighthouse where no one’s going to go.  You put it somewhere dangerous where they have to go.”  (loc. 3358)

    It had seen us – us similes made of Terre, not merely us similes – as key to some more fundamental and enabling not-truth, spoken with dandy élan though only a word-trick, hinted at that shift born of contact.  Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things.  Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much.  Before the humans came, we didn’t speak.

    Through a dissembling made of omitted clauses it laid out its manifesto.  Before the humans came we didn’t speak: so we will, can, must speak through them.  It made a falsity a true aspiration.  (loc. 4165, and how the Ariekei taught themselves to lie – by dropping clauses from the end of a truth.)

 “This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking.”  (loc. 253)

    Overall, I’d call Embassytown a difficult, but not slow, read.  You have to stay alert; it can get confusing at times keeping track of what all those new words mean.  But if you find yourself wondering if you are fully grasping what some of the made-up words mean, head on over to Wikipedia and read their article on the book.  I did, and was pleasantly surprised at my degree of comprehension.

    My main problem while reading Embassytown was figuring out the plotline.  Both the world-building and Avice’s backstory are wonderfully detailed, but it takes a lot of words to present them.  Somewhere around 25%, it dawned on me that I had no idea what the storyline was, mostly because it hadn't been introduced yet.

    Fortunately, China Miéville is a fantastic writer, so much so that even his long and drawn-out planetary descriptions and Avice’s biography held my interest.  I would  however caution other writers not to emulate Miéville in this regard.  Don't wait until the tale is more than one-quarter finished before introducing the main plotline.

    8 Stars.  Here's an excerpt from the Wikipdia article: In attempting to portray an authentically "alien" alien race, Miéville commented that he finds it almost impossible, stating "if you are a writer who happens to be a human, I think it's definitionally beyond your ken to describe something truly inhuman, psychologically, something alien."

    I think that's what China Miéville was trying to accomplish in Embassytown, and FWIW I think he succeeded admirably.